I don't think I should be on here.

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That's where I hope Purvis shall make headway on your behalf, not just for autists in general, but female autists. I think she did several interviews about it. I still have to track them down to watch, Youtube allowing. She's also quite good-looking, very chatty and articulate, and seems super-clever, so I hope that keeps her in the spotlight.

There's another famous late-diagnosed female autist in the UK: Christine McGuinness (recent ex-wife of Paddy McGuinness), who seemingly defies the conventional idea of autism.

I think this anti-female autist stance has roots far older than Simon Baron-Cohen's male/female brain autism theory, but has not been helped by it. Last month, he commented that he regretted making the description, as he found it had not helped understanding of autism in the wider public. (I didn't see that posted as news here at WP - was it?) I have previously seen he was strongly critisised by feminists for this theory, but I think for very wrong ideological reasons: they took him literally, so enforcing sexism, whereas I understood he was appealing to a common gender stereotype to highlight something - that autists tend to engage in very technical behaviours, even if they are artistic, which is typically, but wrongly considered the sole domain of masculinity.

What I do want to say going back to female autists is that 10 years ago I found a rich seam of female autists via Tor Project blurb on Twitter (as it was then). They were all bi/lesbian, skilled programmers and mathematicians, generally super-clever. They were also very much into transhumanism, of which transgenderism is a subset. One of them attempted transitioning to male. I believe the motive was for a female to be able assert oneself better in a toxic-male dominated world.

I had a male autistic acquaintance from long ago, very right wing, who highlighted a Google employee's tweet - a female coder - who was exasperated that her male colleagues would spend the entire weekend coding for a hobby - something women would never do, she claimed. And yet that collection of female autistic lesbians would do exacly that. I figure that woman was not autistic. You see the confirmation bias that the world runs on against female autists.

I now believe that traditional gender stereotypes are nutured, and are still being nutured according to sex, and female autists tend to mask else break under this, if they cannot resist it. Male autists can also break, under the enforced machoism of the male gender stereotype. This can even lead to transgenderism in male autists. Transgenderism is a controversial topic fraught with toxicity, and I hope my words here shall not trigger a flame war. I have an elegant argument that addresses the contradictions within the trans-terf wars, but I cannot contain it within the margin here /fermat.



Please! I stick to a tight circle of sites I visit, but I like a heads-up on where the troubled one are.

So I was doing astrophysics, and we came to General Relativity (/humblebrag!). GR uses a maths called "tensors" very heavily. It took two years for Einstein to master this maths. He had to stop everything else to get on top of it. I can make a joke that while tensors properly describe physically tensing things into twisted shapes, they also tense students emotions into despair. When Einstein wrote tensor equations in his little notebooks, he made an abbreviated tensor notation to save space. After he publish GR, everyone copied his notation. The trouble for me was that this was an abomination: indices were made to look like powers (like x²). My mind could not accept this abuse of notation, this ambiguity, and I failed the course.

I do not have dyslexia or dyscalulia, but that notation just was not right to me. I've since found online webpages that explain all this more clearly, and I'm beginning to put it all together now.

The point I'm making is we all have our limits where we can get to by ourselves, and then after that we need aids: good books to teach; calculators, computers to solve the maths; new AI software to find new ways to solve. Why not assistive technologies, or just downright patience and understanding?

It's a funny thing, isn't it, that life, civilisation, technology, has made us live longer, know more, be more productive, all with the aid of inventions, but we have these social Darwinist judgmental types who frown upon the needs of disabled people. "If they need assistive technology such as wheelchairs / NC headphones / braille writers / subtitles, they just can't survive in the real world, and are best left to die at birth". Fine. You compute the optimum premium for the insurance company to charge customers without this unnatural computer technology then. It turns out that insurance companies depend on actuaries to do these calculations, and they are very knowledgeable technically, very well paid, and many I suspect are (undiagnosed) autists. These terrible judgmentals can be the same people who'll, come the apocaplyse or whatever, find to their horror that they can't get anything done to fend for themselves. The ones who scream "somebody do something! while trying to get a signal on their smartphone to call 911 (sorry Americans, I tend to think of an American boss stereotype here, but we have them in the UK for sure, too).

I am the very rare MtF transgender with passing privilege. I can play golf with older guys for hours and they gender me as female. I get social clues and interact too easily to be considered autistic when presenting female.

I think I had several issues presenting male. The first is that short guys are on the bottom of the social totem pole.
This isn't helped by the fact that dressing well is extremely difficult because they don't make clothes that fit men my size. Growing boys have "gorilla arms" and altering sleeves is hard. The second is people using their limited cognitive resources figuring out my gender. I think I learned female social interactions rather than male ones being around women all my life.

I wear the same clothing sizes as models which makes it really easy to dress nice wearing female clothes.